PAWS: A performance evaluation tool for parallel computing systems

A description is given of PAWS (parallel assessment window system), a set of tools that provides an interactive user-friendly environment for analysis of existing, prototype, and conceptual machine architectures running a common application. PAWS consists of an application tool, an architectural characterization tool, a performance assessment tool, and an interactive graphical display tool. The application characterization tool provides a facility for evaluating the level and degree of an application's parallelism. The architecture characterization tool allows users to create, store, and retrieve descriptions of machines in a database. This approach permits users to evaluate conceptual machines before building any hardware. The performance assessment tool generates profile plots through the interactive graphical display tool. It shows both the ideal parallelism inherent in the machine-independent dataflow graph and